Just like in Outlook when you start typing an email address, Outlook makes a suggestion while typing on possible matching email addresses, TAdvEdit has such capability. The settings to control this lookup or autocompletion capability can be found under TAdvEdit.Lookup. The default and most simple behavior of the lookup is to add entries in the Edit.Lookup.DisplayList stringlist.

This code snippet initializes the lookup with display text and value text. When typing ''Fe'', the dropdown list will suggest ''Ferrari'' and when accepting to autocomplete, the edit control text will be set to ''http://ferrari.it'':

When Lookup.History is set to true, values entered in the edit control are automatically added to the DisplayList. This DisplayList can be persisted in the registry or in an INI file. To enable this capability, set AdvEdit.Persistence.Enable is true and specify the registry key or INI filename via AdvEdit.Persistence.Key and the registry value name or INI file section name with AdvEdit.Persistence.Section.

It can be convenient that there is a fixed suffix or prefix hinting the user typically of the dimension of a value to enter. This can be the currency symbol for entering monetary values or a dimension like degrees Celcius °C. To have this dimension always displayed and as non editable part of the text, it can be set via Suffix and/or Prefix property.

Set AdvEdit.ExcelStyleDecimalSeparator = true

It is a known shortcoming of the Windows operating system EDIT class (that standard VCL TEdit and also TMS TAdvEdit uses) that the caret is not displaying when the height of the control is too small in relation to the choosen font. As this is a Windoiws limitation, it can only be solved by either increasing the control height or decreasing the font size.

EmptyText is the text that is displayed in the control when the Text property of the edit control is an empty string. EmptyText as such is just a display value and is unrelated to what is persisted in the databse. EmptyText is typically a grey text suggesting what the user should enter and disappears as soon as the user typed text.

To initialize focus handling properly when creating a TAdvEdit at runtime, call TAdvEdit.Init after creation.

Drop a default TAdvEdit on the form and initialize the lookup with code similar to:

type at least 2 characters (default setting) and the lookup list should display